 Hello everyone, I'm Sean Boyd here in the Cal OES newsroom in Mather, California. As you may have heard, Cal OES sent a contingent of 35 plus team members to Puerto Rico to assist in the response and recovery efforts there. We sent one of our own public information officers there to assist with communication efforts. She is Monica Vargas and is standing by live right now for us there in Puerto Rico. Monica, what is the latest? What can you tell us? Give us an update. Hey Sean, so the big news of the day is that yesterday president signed a major disaster declaration for six of the areas that were hardest hit by the earthquake. So those are mainly in southern Puerto Rico and they were identified in the major disaster declaration that was requested by the governor of Puerto Rico. Terrific. So speaking of the shelters, how are the residents there, the folks who live there and have been affected by the earthquakes? How are they coping with not only the shelter situation but also those folks who haven't gone to the shelters? Are they still outside or have they gone back inside? So there is a massive operation here with five base camps throughout the areas that were impacted and these are these are large base camps which are for the those that have had some anxiety returning back home but these have all the services you would need while you're displaced. They have showers, food, entertainment for kids, medical services and areas for your pets where I'm standing is right in between a base camp that has a capacity of almost two thousand and a current shelter that has about nine hundred residents and those residents are going to get into the base camp right across the street. What is the mood there? What are you sensing? Has any kind of optimism sort of sunk in yet or are they still sort of in shell shock if you will? You know with the major disaster declaration that that obviously opens up more resources to come and help this area and the residents and the government but just all around you see a lot of people a lot of people coming together and moving supplies moving resources just on the freeway when we were returning from another part of the area where we were with some of the safety assessment teams from california we saw convoy of vehicles from the department of veteran affairs and we think we also saw some out of state team members that had just arrived. So all around you are resources people and help for everyone who has been displaced. Have you had a chance to speak with any of the other uh Cal OES deployments uh some of those folks to find out how things are going for them? I have everyone is very busy by means who are in a downtown uh area called Laha which is about an hour so away from where we currently are and they were inspecting homes and schools public areas and with various members of the community everyone doing a lot of great work with their local and state counterparts. Okay very good. Final question here. What do you anticipate coming up over the weekend? Well coming up over the weekend we're going to keep doing what we're doing standing here. All right monica thanks very much. We appreciate all the hard work you and the incident support team are doing out there. Please convey our thanks to them and uh good luck come uh this weekend and we'll hope to talk to you again on Monday. For all of us here at Cal OES headquarters in Mather California I'm Sean Boy. Take care be safe and have a great weekend. We'll talk to you soon.